Hilltop Window Latch Process Improvement

Hilltop Business Services as part of The Arc of Livingston Wyoming assembles window latches in large volumes for a well-established customer. To remain competitive, Hilltop Business Service wishes to automate enough of the assembly process to meet production requirements. Specifically, the improvement needs to meet a takt time -- which is how long it takes to fully assemble the latch -- of three (3) seconds. This process improvement project stems from initial work performed by a Multidisciplinary Senior Design team in 2018 to 2019, which suggested ways to improve the manual assembly process. Our team made up of students from the Kate Gleason College of Engineering worked with the customer developed and designed a robotic assembly cell to meet the customer needs. The five station cell enables the customer to meet the required demand while ensuring the quality of parts assembled.

Automation cell

Automation cell

Completed assembly